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Re: 10 States to Boost Minimum Wage.....

Originally Posted by MarineTpartier

People (mainly liberals, socialists, etc) clamor for higher minimum wage all the time. This is simple math really. Business owners will simply fire one worker and make another work harder to make up for it. It's like the call for socialized medicine. Employers have already figured a way around it. That's the problem with all of these social programs. We're in a capitalist system. The business owners will simply find a way around them everytime.

I'm convinced they would find a way around it in any system that was not an autocracy. Businesses in France try to dodge the labor regulations all the time. Which is why you have so many 49 employee businesses there .

Re: 10 States to Boost Minimum Wage.....

Originally Posted by MMC

Nearly 1 million minimum-wage workers in 10 states will get a pay boost come New Year's Day.

Workers in Rhode Island will see their paychecks grow the most -- by an average of $510 a year for the average worker, according to the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy group. The state enacted a law in June raising its minimum wage 35 cents to $7.75 an hour.

In nine other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington -- the minimum wage will jump between 10 and 15 cents an hour, translating to an extra $190 to $410 per year on average, according to NELP. The increases in these states are the result of state "indexing" laws that require automatic annual adjustments to keep pace with rising living costs.

An estimated 855,000 workers will be directly affected by the wage changes, while another 140,000 are projected to beindirectly affected by the changes as employers readjust their pay scales to accommodate the new minimum,according to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

The new hourly rates will range between $7.35 in Missouri and $9.19 in Washington state, which has the highest minimum wage in the nation.

States must pay at least the same as the federal minimum wage, which has been set at $7.25 an hour since 2009 and is not indexed to inflation. That works out to an annual income of about $15,000-- thousands of dollars below the poverty level for a family of four.

In 2013, 19 states and the District of Columbia will have rates above the federal level.

Do you think this will make it easier to get a job or harder? 19 States above the Federal level. Thoughts?

I don't think it'll make much difference from a "getting a job" perspective. It's good news for minimum-wage earners; that's for sure. Companies don't usually hire people they don't need, so it's not like they're just going to stop hiring because minimum wage went up by $510 a year. If they can't afford it? Best they go out of business and let someone else enter the marketplace with a better business model.

Re: 10 States to Boost Minimum Wage.....

Notice that the term "Entry Level Job" has been quietly removed from the American lexicon.

Minimum wage jobs were never meant to be career jobs, they are jobs for the elderly and kids. In the past twenty years, the United States has imported millions of people with the mindset that once they get a minimum wage job, they stay forever, that is their career. Sometimes they move to another minimum wage job.

That "Minimum wage job as career" mindset also includes NEVER doing anything to improve yourself, never learning, never advancing and never getting an education You simply stay in the job, keeping others out and scream because your wages are too low to raise your family of five children. That is the mindset of the non-Western immigrants. These people vote for liberals who condemn employers as "stingy" for not giving them more money and when the minimum wage is raised, the government gets more in taxes from the employer.

Re: 10 States to Boost Minimum Wage.....

Candidate Obama promised to raise the minimum wage every year and has not done it once since being elected, or even tried to, so apparently the liberals who re-elected him gave him a mandate to keep it at $7.25 per hour. These states need to have the heel of federalism crush them for getting out of line.